Indeed, we wanted to use the native hypervisor capabilities of macOS so we based off of hyperkit. Other than the VM driver, it’s all the same code that Multipass on Linux uses.

It will download the freshest image from http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/, configure and launch it for you. It will then keep track of the image changes so the next time you want a new instance, the image is already there for you.

You can use cloud-init to preconfigure the instance to your liking (see multipass help launch).